Zags reporting MA Will Be Brought Back. Please boycott the games and donations
- Thread starter Johnnies7286
- Start date
You misunderstood my point. I totally agree the Covid excuse was poor.
Sorry this is pretty weak. The COVID stuff is just bizarre, since most of the schools SJU competes against were under the same restrictions.
No it was my mistake I responded to the wrong post, meant to respond to the original BigRed post.
My bad.
G’Town and ND are great schools , But , when it comes to BB or other sports , I would say that ND might be a lot harder than G’Town in their Admittance policies for Athletes. Very few of Ewing’s kids have graduated , many more at ND . I claim no factual basis , just my opinion . My Granddaughter a recent ND grad says the Administration there really works to get the Athletes to graduate and it’s observable .
RedStormRising
Well-known member
Makes a lot of sense. Can Gtown humble itself and hire a coach that rejected them in the past? I think it would be wise move.
L J S A
Well-known member
It makes a ton of sense from his perspective for sure. The shorter drive to the beach where he wants to retire is definitely a selling point. Not sure how Georgetown's board stacks up against St. John's in terms of its anti-Pitino stance though.
I assume Georgetown is still a more popular brand than St. John's, so they might be OK bringing a Brey in. We need a bigger splash than they do, even though they've sucked worse lately.
I don't think Brey is bad. He mostly just grew stale at ND.
braintrust
Well-known member
Ewing kids don't stay long enough. I wonder how many four year kids Ewing has had? And, a Georgetown degree is arguably the most prestige in the Big East.
Maybe Coach K was in NY to get NYU to return to big time , Div 1 BB? He volunteered to be their first Coach . Val Ackerman already on the phone to NYU offering Big East admittance immediately . Warning : this is a fact less commentary but , hey haven’t stranger things happened ? Sometimes ..
RedStormRising
Well-known member
These goals haven’t been met since Louie who amazingly got to the NCAA tournament 70% of the time! Unfortunately, that was over 30 years ago. Since then we make the NCAA’s at a 25% clip. (Had to look both these up, both numbers surprised me)
This is why it’s so frustrating Lavin gets run out of town. Yes he only made the NCAA 2 out of 5 years, but one of the losing years he couldn’t coach sue to coach and he still represented St. John’s admirably. There was no scandal, he was charming with the press (and in my brief experience the fans) and he was demonstratively better than everyone since Louie and for some reason the pitchforks came out and we ran him out of town.
We are not entitled to 20 wins based on our name alone. Imagine Pittsburgh saying we should compete for the BCS championship every year because we were really good at football on the 70’s! Preposterous!
We either have to recalibrate our expectations (check our privilege as the kids say).
Or
Raise a war chest and make Cragg hire a proven winner that isn’t an AARP member (Billy Donovan who would probably cost 7M a year).
Or do a deep dive hire a young coach with potential and let him mold the program in his imagine. If we get lucky and find a Jay Wright, Ed Cooley, Mark Few or Shaka Smart (coaches who can win in non-football environments) we have to be willing do the right thing to keep them including compensating them fairly, reinvesting in facilities, travel, housing etc., and keeping the NIL war chest full.
Otherwise we are going to go in 5 year cycles of hope, reality, stagnation, regression, regime change.
RedmanMike
Well-known member
You are correct RSR - we haven't achieved these goals since Looie was coaching. And yes, Lavin came closest to getting there. Looking back with 20-20 hindsight, it was a mistake to let him go.
No one is saying we are entitled to anything, but I also do not think we need to recalibrate our expectations - even given the disadvantages we love to harp on (subpar facilities, no big money donors etc.)
We are one good coaching hire away from getting where we want to go.
The real mistake - bigger than letting Lavin go - was not hiring Bob McKillop instead of him. If we had brought McKillop in after Norm was let go, recent history would have been completely different around here.
One smart hiring decision changes everything. It did then - and it still can now.
Lavin by now would have had us in the tournament constantly. His kids liked him, the media liked him, and he surrounded himself with winners, all until people drinking the Mullin kool aid took over. I am still surprised how much of a class act he is to the school post firing.
A good friend chatted with Steve L the evening he was let go. My buddy said to his credit he took the high road and did not knock SJU, noting the administration wanted to hire Chris to get them back to glory days status. I used to find him corny and a bit over the top, but clearly he could recruit and did have some success here. I often wonder long term how he would have done here if he did not develop cancer, which seemed to set him back. He needed a bench savvy guy to help manage games, but his affability really appealed to recruits and their families. Imo it was not one of SJU Administration‘s finest days when they courted Chris in the middle of SL’s last season.
A once solid coach at the tail end of his career. Why does that sounds familiar?
Lav can be both corny, and still be candid, insightful and articulate. A bit like Donny Marshall. And some might say, me. lol
I do recall watching a Georgetown- Villanova game a few years ago that was being played at Georgetown. The Hoya fans were yelling "safety school" at the Nova players.
Villanova is no longer the regional college which the grey-haired AARPs on this site remember it to have been in the 1096s and 70s.
The admission requirements for Georgetown and Villanova are not as different as you may think.
The College Board reports that the SAT scores for
Villanova were 1320/ 1470 compared to
Georgetown's 1380/ 1550.
Villanova is not a safety school.
G’Town kids haven’t had much to yell about during the Ewing era , other than the 1 Time march to BE Tourney Win . I doubt Nova kids were yelling 0 for the BE season last year to the Hoya kids . Or , “ we have 3 NCAA titles and you don’t .”
i like lavin and it’s an interesting what if, but for whatever reason (cancer, dad, undermined) he just stopped recruiting. We had a whole team leaving and not much coming back in (good ol Felix). We were going back to square one that next season regardless.